Boti Bliss (as Bundy’s girlfriend) is probably the best thing about this film.

It’s hard to have scenario and mise-en-scène work together to dramatically show the psychological break which must have happened when Bundy was about 27 years old.

What is most problematic is that Ted Bundy isn’t really a horror movie. It’s a drama. Perhaps in order to reach a wider audience, the blood was toned down.

There’s even a camp aspect to this film which really undercuts its aspiration for greatness.

Literally, the film delves into a sort of dark humor. It is an odd, out-of-place element every time it pops up.

Ted Bundy is a low-budget film. Ted Bundy the personage was of such complex psychic energy that he (and his victims) deserved a more dedicated production.

I would therefore have to describe Matthew Bright’s directorial effort as uninspired.

At least they could have gotten the color of Bundy’s VW Beetle right.

The call center was brilliant (yes, Ted Bundy was an operator for a suicide hotline), but even more artful (if one is looking for such cinematic threads) is that he worked for a government agency in the state of Washington while said agency was looking for girls that (unbeknownst to them) HE had kidnapped.

In an interesting twist of fate, Bundy appears to have murdered a girl with the last name of Manson (although her remains were never recovered). Donna Gail Manson was a 19-year-old student at The Evergreen State University in Olympia, Washington. She left her dorm to attend a jazz concert on campus and was never seen again.

Bundy was an extremely-failed law school student. This was very troubling for him.

Bundy worked his way from Washington and Oregon down through Idaho, Utah, and Colorado.

Ted Bundy is not clear in delineating that Bundy was stringing along two women (in relationships) at once [all while killing and raping other young women].

The scenario or metteur en scène failed to exploit this subplot. It was, rather, inserted hesitatingly as a sort of afterthought.

The film misses another crucial detail. While Bundy was in Utah, he was baptized as a Mormon. [The church later excommunicated him.]

I must credit the filmmakers for getting the “rape kit” right (in comparison to a photo of Bundy’s own such collection of items).

But I must protest again. Bundy was a photographer. Sure, they were Polaroids…of people he’d killed. But how does that detail escape a creation in a field bound up with the ontology of the image for so long?

The failure, then, was that our director could not imagine himself as Ted Bundy. In all other areas of life (perhaps besides criminology), that would be a blessing. But as a filmmaker framing history, it’s a curse.

Yes, exactly! It is a scary world. I don’t have children, but I would want them to be as prepared as possible for the horrors of this world.

I spent quite a bit of time last night reading about the different takes on Bundy’s personality. Two interesting hypotheses (or diagnoses) were NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) and ASPD (antisocial personality disorder). –PD